Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746)

2. The foundations of morality and the moral sense

Much of Hutcheson’s early work may be seen as a contribution to a long-standing debate about the foundations of morality. For over a century before Hutcheson joined the debate, moral theorists had offered fundamentally incompatible accounts of the origin and nature of morality. Every participant in this debate accepted the fact that there are moral phenomena to explain. No participant denied, for example, that there is a set of moral terms (such terms as, in English, ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘virtue’, ‘vice’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘just’, ‘unjust’) that are competently used by ordinary speakers. Even those philosophers who were said to have denied that morality has a foundation assumed that it is to rational beings (principally humans) and their actions that this set of terms applies, and supposed that ordinary humans do so apply the terms, however much they may disagree about which term to use in any given situation. The controversy raged, however, over the proper characterization of such moral phenomena. For many writers, it was not merely a matter of providing a causal explanation of these phenomena. Even cynics and sceptics could do that. Rather, these writers, who tended to think of themselves as moral realists, demanded that a proper understanding of morality be a part of this explanation. Having concluded that moral differences are both real and unique, they insisted that one could be said to have given an account of the foundations of morality only if one could trace these real and unique moral differences to some set of objective and unique natural or transcendental features adequate to ground such differences in a non-reductive way.

Hutcheson’s work illustrates this latter demand. In a preview of his influential Inquiry, he says that his new work will include an essay on the foundations of morality, a needed antidote to the socially poisonous views of those (most notably Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke, as we later learn) who suppose that the ‘foundation of virtue’ is nothing more than fear of punishment. In the Inquiry itself Hutcheson develops his criticism of these ‘selfish moralists’ (egoists, as we would say), and also makes explicit his deeply felt objections to Mandeville’s claim that what is called virtue is simply ‘the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride’ (1725a).

Although his philosophy owes much to Locke’s empiricist approach to ideas and knowledge, Hutcheson was far from satisfied with Locke’s account of our moral ideas and our moral psychology. According to Locke, our normative ideas – of beauty and virtue, for example – are complex ideas of mixed modes, and, although formed out of the materials of experience, have no objective reference. These ideas, Locke says, are constructed by our minds, and are neither copies of anything real, nor even made according to the pattern of any real existence. Hutcheson found this anti-realist account of the origin of our moral ideas seriously flawed. Moreover, he also complained that Locke’s account of human pleasure and pain was too narrowly focused. Locke had failed to note that there are pleasures and pains other than those that arise in conjunction with ordinary sensations. Indeed, Locke had failed to note that there are more than five senses, and that our additional senses – the sense of beauty and the moral sense – give rise to distinctive pleasures and pains (to approbations and disapprobations) that enable us to make moral distinctions and moral evaluations. Human nature is considerably more complex than Locke had supposed.

As to Hutcheson’s disagreement with Hobbes and Mandeville, Hutcheson can be seen to have rejected their pessimistic, cynical view of human nature – in effect, that humans are inherently corrupt – and to have adopted in its place the more optimistic view that human nature incorporates a substantial element of goodness. More particularly, while Hobbes and Mandeville argue that all human acts are motivated by self-interest, Hutcheson argues that humans have, and actually do act from, other-regarding motives, and that the ‘selfish theory’ – the view that all motivations are self-interested – cannot account for many features of our moral experience. Hutcheson sees the selfish theorists as maintaining that we act only from a regard for our own pleasure, and hence that those things that we call ‘good’ are simply those things that give us pleasure, and that the actions we call ‘morally good’ or ‘just’ are simply those actions that correspond to whatever laws politicians happen to have promulgated. As a matter of pure speculation these claims may be comprehensible, but a more careful survey of our moral evaluations shows them to be false.

Hutcheson notes in the Inquiry, for example (1) that although both a generous action and a productive field give us pleasure, there is a significant difference in the pleasures derived from these two things. Our approbation of them differs in such a way that we would think it quite odd or senseless to say that the field is virtuous, but entirely sensible to say that the action is virtuous (1725a: 114–5, 119, 140–41); (2) that while reading history we learn of temporally distant individuals who cannot contribute to our interests or pleasure, and that, as the actions of these individuals vary, so do our responses: we feel approbation toward some, and disapprobation or indifference toward others; (3) that while we benefit from the actions of an individual who treasonously betrays his country to ours, we none the less morally disapprove of that individual and his actions; (4) that while we ourselves may be bribed to perform an action which we think to be morally wrong, we cannot be bribed to feel that this same action is right or that we are right to undertake it; (5) that we sometimes feel a moral indignation toward a person who has caused us no injury at all, while on other occasions we find that, although someone has acted in such a way as to injure us, we feel no moral indignation.

Facts of this sort, Hutcheson concludes, establish beyond doubt that the selfish theory is mistaken. They show that there are natural (immediate and unlearned) differences in our responses to actions or events, differences that cannot be accounted for by this theory. Our moral approvals and disapprovals are more subtle than these philosophers have thought. We find that we naturally and routinely make reliable distinctions (1) between natural good and moral good; (2) between moral good and moral evil; and (3) between things that are immediately good and those only ‘advantageous’ or instrumentally good. Given these important facts, the question becomes, as Hutcheson typically frames it: ‘What feature of human nature is presupposed by the fact that we can and do make these distinctions?’ His answer: ‘The moral sense’. Had we, he writes in the Inquiry, no moral sense enabling us to perceive the moral qualities of agents and actions, we could not respond to them as we do. Without a moral sense we might have developed an abstract idea of virtue, but we would not, as we do, actively approve and esteem those who reveal themselves to be virtuous. Had we ‘no Sense of moral Good in Humanity…Self-Love, and our Sense of natural Good’ would cause us, contrary to fact, always to approve, for example, of the traitor who benefits our cause, and always to disapprove the courageous patriot who harms our cause. But that is not the case; the facts do not fit the egoists’ theory. Rather, such facts reveal that ‘there is in human Nature a disinterested ultimate Desire of the Happiness of others’, an inherent benevolent, and hence moral, concern.

Humans have also an inherent cognitive power that enables them to respond differently to benevolence and self-interest. The human mind is formed in such a way that it can approve or condemn actions or agents without concern for its own pleasure or interest. Just as the Creator has ‘determin’d us to receive, by our external Senses, pleasant or disagreeable Ideas of Objects, according as they are useful or hurtful to our Bodys …[so] he has given us a moral Sense, to direct our Actions, and to give us still nobler Pleasures’. Thus if two individuals contribute in similar ways to our wellbeing, but the one acts ‘from an ultimate Desire of our Happiness, or Good-will toward us; and the other from Views of Self-Interest, or by Constraint’, we have, we find, significantly different responses to these two individuals and their acts. In response to the one we feel gratitude and approbation; to the other we are indifferent. Or, if we know that an individual has benevolent dispositions but has been prevented from exercising them, we count that individual as morally good even though they have not been able to act – even though they have done nothing to benefit us. The nature and complexity of these responses show that we must have a perceptual power, a moral sense, for without such a sense we would assess fields and agents or patriots and traitors only with regard to our own interests and wellbeing.

In the third edition (1729) of the Inquiry Hutcheson explicitly denied that he meant to identify virtue and vice with feelings or sentiment. The moral sense relies upon feelings to distinguish virtue or vice, but moral qualities are themselves independent of the observer who feels approbation or disapprobation of them. The ‘admired Quality’, he says, is a quality of the agent judged, and entirely distinct from the approbation or pleasure of either the approving observer or the agent, and the moral perceptions (the idea or concept) involved ‘plainly represents something quite distinct from this Pleasure’. Feelings play a cognitive and a motivating role, but virtue is constituted by the benevolent disposition that gives rise to approbation, and vice by the malevolent or sometimes indifferent dispositions that give rise to disapprobation.

Gilbert Burnet and John Balguy, two early rationalist critics, pronounced themselves satisfied with Hutcheson’s good intentions and even with his fundamental conclusion, namely that virtue and vice are, contrary to Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville, fundamentally real. Burnet, in his Letter to the London Journal (1969–71, vol. 7: 6) could not agree, however, that Hutcheson had found ‘the true and solid foundation’ of morality, while Balguy (1728–9), all praise for Hutcheson’s good nature and good sense, regrets that he makes serious mistakes – mistakes that ‘lie at the Foundations of Morality, and like Failures in Ground-work, affect the whole Building’.

Burnet’s fundamental complaint is that Hutcheson’s account of moral good and evil explains these notions only relatively – only as good or evil things relate to us or affect us – and gives us no guarantee that good and evil have an immutable foundation in the nature of things. Balguy objected that Hutcheson had rested virtue or morality on two features of human nature, a natural affection (a concern for others) and an instinct (the moral sense). These are, he granted, features of humankind, and it is right of Hutcheson to try to represent virtue as something that flows ‘unalterably from the Nature of Men and Things’. But, he went on, Hutcheson portrays morality as something arbitrary, dependent upon human features ‘that might originally have been otherwise, or even contrary to what they now are; and [that] may at any time be alter’d, or inverted, if the Creator pleases’ (1728: 292). Moreover, in Hutcheson’s hands morality is resolved into ‘mere Instinct’. If we are motivated to what we call virtuous acts by an instinct, of what moral merit are the resulting actions? These actions seem to be necessitated, while virtuous acts are always free acts. If Hutcheson should reply that these instincts do not ‘force the Mind, but only incline it’, then, says Balguy, it will be reason, and not the moral sense, that decides our actions and thus serves as the foundation of morality.

Hutcheson undertook to meet these objections in a series of letters to the London Journal (1725b) and in the second part of his Essay of 1728. As an ordained clergyman of the Westminster Confession, Hutcheson was unwilling to deny the creative freedom of the Deity. Consequently, he could not in one sense deny that his theory of the moral sense made morality dependent upon the free choice of the Deity. But he could and did argue that, were the Deity’s basic nature not in its own way similar to our kindest affections and best moral nature, then he would not have been motivated to create us in the particular manner in which he did actually create us. On the other hand, if we suppose that the Deity does have an analogously kind and moral nature, then we see at once that this would have motivated him to create us as he did. As long as we are satisfied that the Deity is unchanging, and that his is the best nature possible, we can see that our own natures are nothing like the merely arbitrary result of some divine whim. Our natures are, in any relevant sense, necessary and necessarily fixed or unchanging.

To the charge that he had made morality dependent on an instinct that effectively eliminates the free choice required of moral behaviour, Hutcheson replied by distinguishing between instincts of body and certain mental powers or ‘affections’. The latter, he insists, are no more destructive of morality than is the ‘Determination to pursue Fitness’ that, according to his opponents, characterizes the divine will. Virtue, Hutcheson argues, can be real and meritorious even though perceived by a sense, and chosen because of an affection or instinct. It is not necessary that reason play these roles. Hutcheson’s critics were not satisfied by these replies (Richard Price (1758) was to pose similar objections some thirty years later; see Price, R.), but Hutcheson’s responses show how far he was from being the moral noncognitivist some commentators have supposed. He undertook to determine the origin of our moral ideas in order ‘to prove what we call the Reality of Virtue’ (1725a: xi). That his inquiry led him to argue that our moral concerns and evaluations depend on certain fundamental dispositions and feelings – that morality has its origin in certain senses and affections found in human nature – should not prevent us from recognizing this realist intent.